To Be Alone
by Dinogeek
Summary: Response to Ginger S's quote challenge: 'As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn't supposed to ever let us down probably will.' Non-explicit references to child abuse.


**A/N: Bet y'all thought I'd run screaming into the wilderness or something. Well, I haven't, but unfortunately the last year and a half or so has been... _trying_ , so to speak, and little things like recreation and enjoying myself kind of fell onto the back burner. But I promise, life's back on track and soon my stories will be too. In the meantime, this for Ginger S, who in her (very good) story The Let Down challenged people to write a fic based on the quote in the summary. Hopefully this will live up to her standards, and maybe I'll continue it. ^-^**

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The child on the bed whimpered as another jolt of pain shot through his broken leg. It hurt, oh boy did it hurt, but he couldn't have any pain medicine for it, not yet. Nothing until they could tell if he had a concussion or not. He was trying valiantly not to cry, or even look like he might, but he let himself slip a little bit now- now, all alone in the cold hospital room with nothing but pain for company, he let himself cry for just a minute.

 _Men don't cry,_ a depressingly familiar voice shot out inside his head. _But you'll never be a man anyway. Hell, I'll be surprised if you manage to live that long._ The eight year old gripped the bed sheets like a vice as he fought down the urge to scream out loud. His unbroken leg scraped along the surface of the stiff old mattress as if moving one limb would reduce the pain in another. The room was frigid during the Wyoming winters and the bare wooden walls creaked and groaned against the wind that battered the clinic from the outside. The only other sound in the room was the ticking of the wall clock and the clanking groan of the overworked heater pipes.

He shivered and pulled the blanket up further towards his chin, whimpering again when it pulled across his broken leg. A spasm of pain ran up from his tibia and he thrashed involuntarily, knocking the metal chart that hung on the end of the bed down onto the linoleum. He winced at the noise, fearing that somebody would hear it and get him in more trouble than he already was. The chart had opened when it fell and he could see his name splayed out in big block letters across the top of the yellowing paper: STANLEY, HENRY MICHAEL.

Smaller print below listed all his previous visits. He couldn't read those from the bed but he knew exactly what they said already. _Fell out of bed… Tripped on stairs… Slipped on ice… Ran into wall…_ The list was long. At eight, Hank had spent more time in the hospital than most people had at eighty. It was a pity so few of those reasons were the truth.

The ill-fitting door squeaked opened and the nurse bustled in looking irritated. Hank tried to look repentant but a fresh spasm interrupted his efforts. The nurse picked the chart up off the floor and flipped it shut with a metallic clank before returning it to its place on the end of the bed. Then she turned around and left without a word to the hurting boy, leaving him on his own once again.

He spent a few minutes shivering, whether from pain or from cold or from a combination of both he didn't know, before the door squeaked open again and the doctor came in, giving him a slightly wooden nod. Hank looked back at him, desperate to ask but not wanting to speak. Finally, he forced it out.

"Am I… do I have a concussion?" The doctor shook his head.

"Not this time, but you've broken your tibia again. We'll give you a shot of morphine and get you casted up." Hank tried hard not to let his mouth twist. He didn't like morphine; it made him feel funny and it just made everything hurt worse once it wore off. "We'll go ahead and send you home tomorrow. I'll be back with the shot in just a minute."

He turned and left the room, seeming to forget that his patient even existed, and behind him the boy felt all the color leave his face. He was trembling again, but this time he knew the cause of it. He didn't want to go home. Home hurt. Hank felt his mind spinning as panic threatened to overtake him and leave him in a daze.

He would rather die than go back there.

He didn't know why the doctor and the nurses and the teachers and the neighbors all left him there. He didn't know why he was put there in the first place, and right now he was too tired and too scared to care. He just wanted his leg to stop hurting and stay at this horrible drafty clinic on morphine forever if that was what it took. For the first time since he'd been left in that room he fell apart. Tears were streaking silently down his face and he was too wrapped up in all his levels of pain to hear the squeaky door open just a foot or two.

He just about fell off the mattress when he felt a little hand slip into his. "Hi-low, Hank." He cracked his eyes open.

"Hi Lily. How did you get in here?" he used his free hand to wipe the tears off of his face. His little sister smiled.

"The door." Her remark did what it intended- it got a smile out of the boy.

"Very funny, Lil." A pain-induced tremor flitted through him and he gripped his sister's hand tightly. She frowned, gray eyes wide, and made a series of signed gestures that, in their strange pidgin sign language basically amounted to _are you okay?_ He smiled through the pain and nodded the best he could.

"Yeah, I'll be okay; they're giving me some pain medicine." He began to sign too. ' _You should leave before they find you here.'_

' _I want to stay.'_

' _But I don't want you to get in trouble, and you know you'll be if_ he _finds you here.'_ He hated using that card on the six year old but he was on the verge of desperation; he knew the doctor would be back in a minute and Lily would get in trouble too, just for sneaking in to see him. She glared at him, knowing exactly what he was doing, but she reluctantly acquiesced.

Hank's hand felt a lot colder when she pulled hers out and the tears he was still suppressing were pushing their way back into his eyes. Before his sister turned around he lifted up his right hand in an open five, lowering the two middle fingers. She repeated the gesture, pressing her hand up against his gently, and then kissed him before scurrying out. Her soft footsteps vanished and the creaky old door swung as shut as it could get.

And he was all alone again.

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 **A/N: An open five with the lowered fingers is ASL for "I love you". Unfortunately, that sort of apathy to such serious issues was widespread until the 1970s, when CAPTA was passed and states began to enact mandatory reporting laws that required people in certain professions to contact the police or another agency if they suspected that a child was being abused. Before that it was seen as somebody's private business, which you just didn't get into. And, unfortunately, some people were just terrible, laws or not...**


End file.
